I’d never wear a suit to Aza’s funeral, unless it was that suit, and I’m not allowed to wear that, so.
I’m not calm. I’m not ready. But I’m getting in my car, bagful of things seat-belted into the passenger seat. Her seat.
I change clothes in the bathroom at school. I walk into Mr. Grimm’s class, past the first period warning bell, and sit down.
Everyone looks at me. The whole room is dressed in parent-picks, black dresses, black tights, black suits, and ironed shirts and ties.
Keep looking, I want to tell them. I’m not finished.
“Mr. Kerwin,” says Mr. Grimm. I look at him. He looks at me. His face softens.
“I can’t say that I blame you. Take the top part off and you can stay in the room, but I can’t teach you like that.”
I put the top on the empty desk beside me. It has graffiti on it. Aza Ray Was Here it says, in silver nail polish. Mr. Grimm kept saying he was going to make her clean it off, but he didn’t.
I never thought this would happen.
I thought this would probably happen.
I knew this was coming.
I didn’t see this coming.
How can anyone keep reciting an endless number when you can’t see the next digit? But I keep going. 673518857527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320 0056812714526356 08277857713427577896.
At noon, the bell rings, the special one that says Here we go to do something completely terrible, and I walk out. The flag’s half-mast. It’s not the school’s doing; they didn’t even think of it. It went down this morning at around three a.m. I know the janitors.
Kids start pouring out of the building behind me. A lot of them are crying, which makes me both pleased and angry. I think having a dying kid in a school means, in people’s brains, that no one else will die. That slot’s taken. Everyone’s crying over her anyway, even though, to them, she was only the Dying Girl, not glow-painting, hoax-making, squid-watching Aza.
Looping. Some days are so dark I can’t see anything but a miserable fog of number after number, word after word, clouds of verbs and nouns and none of them the ones that will make time go backward.
Some of us, I name no names, haven’t actually cried since the night Aza died. I can feel it wanting to happen, but if I do it, all of me will drain out. So I don’t.
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you . . .
That is Mr. E.E. Cummings. He gets that part right. And the last two lines too, which are:
for life’s not a paragraph
and death i think is no parenthesis
People recite it at funerals, but it’s a non-optimistic poem about not getting what you want, not a good-feelings poem about death being no big deal. Aza liked Cummings. Hence, me liking him.
I pull out of the lot and start honking my horn. Everyone follows me, first the whole school, and then, as I move onto the highway, the town. Or at least, that’s how it feels.
Aza told me a long time ago what she did anytime she had an MRI. She’d imagine the beeps and clicks were whales.
I’m doing my version. Our cars are whales talking to one another. In a kind of fake-o Morse code. (Yes, people who memorize all the facts about everything are also people who create fake codes, because we sometimes enjoy a little chaos. A little controlled chaos.) The cars are honking my list. Also, it’s fake Morse because I don’t need everyone to know what I want to say.
The first time I saw Aza she was sitting on the floor playing with a piece of paper, snipping at it with a pair of (I later learned, stolen) scissors. I got up off my mat, but she had nothing to say to me. She only looked at me once, and bared her teeth.
She was something found underneath lake ice after the spring melt. I know she hated how she looked, which. Oh. World, you are stupid.
YOU LOOK LIKE NO ONE ELSE ON EARTH, I honk. The town honks it in echo.
I felt like the doll belonging to Julie next door, the doll that, when you (um, experiment?) cut off a leg, had a hollow body. Aza stole that doll and stuffed it full of crickets. I glued the leg back on. Julie was fairly freaked out when her doll started to Jiminy.
Aza wasn’t nice. She had a way of looking sideways at me and then solving me like a too-easy equation.
“Give me something worse,” she’d periodically say. “Make it harder.” I didn’t succeed in bullshitting her very often.
YOU HAVE SPIKES ALL OVER YOUR HEART, I honk.
When she walked away that first day, I picked up what she’d been working on. A paper ship, masts and sails, tiny people climbing the rigging. A sea made of clouds, which she’d cut using little curls of paper, so that it tossed beneath the ship. An anchor chain made of paper loops, anchor weighted with her gum.
Yeah, welcome to Aza, age five.
Jason Kerwin: file under Done.
Aza Ray Boyle: file under Everything.
I chased after her, and recited the alphabet backward in a frenzy, but I never thought she’d listen. She’s the only person who’s ever made me feel so far behind.
Again she looked at me, this time with maybe pity, so I tried the Greek alphabet. It wasn’t as though I could read Greek—I was little—but Carol had taught me the phonetic version, and I’d memorized the letters like I was memorizing a song. I thought I saw a spark of interest in her eyes, but she just sighed, tore another piece of paper out of her notebook, and started snipping.
“I’m working,” she said, in the most judgmental tone.